Colonialism and male domestic service across the Asia Pacific offers a multi-sited set of historical accounts of male servants and the work contexts within which they were employed from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. Written by four historians from the University of Wollongong and the University of Newcastle, this book traces and analyses the dynamics of work relationships between white European and American colonial masters and their male Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Malay, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Pacific Islander servants, by using a variety of sources, ranging from diaries, letters, and photographic images, to oral histories, court testimonies, shipping and hotel records, as well as secondary literature.

Following an introduction and a beginning chapter that lays the historical contours of European and Asian cultures of domestic service, the rest of the chapters are devoted to case studies, starting in chapter 2 with the work of indigenous houseboys in northern Australia and Fiji in the 1870s, then proceeding in chapter 3 with the lives of domestic workers in US-occupied Manila right before the turn of the twentieth century. The fourth chapter is devoted to a set of analyses of colonial-era photographs, culled from various collections across Southeast Asia and Australia, of servants and their masters, oftentimes depicting groups of housekeepers or individual caretakers with their master's child or children. Chapters 5 and 6 move away from home settings by respectively focusing on the work of Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Japanese stewards on steamships that sailed mostly on the Indian and Pacific Oceans from the 1910s until the 1920s, followed by the labours of domestic service staff members directly recruited from Calcutta for employment in the Grand Pacific Hotel in Suva, Fiji, when it opened in 1914. There, they worked as bell boys, dining room staff, cooks, and butlers. The chapter which follows concentrates on narrating instances of anti-colonial labour activism as advocated by domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and French Indochina from the 1910s to the 1930s, either as individuals or as members of larger collectives. In the conclusion, the authors offer a recap and a threading together of the arguments and themes of the preceding chapters by highlighting the unstable connections between white colonial power and nonwhite male domestic work, the intellectual benefits of considering the specificities of place-bound labour recruitment along with patterns of servitude across nearby sites, and the prominent, multifaceted, and critical roles that male service workers played in the histories of colonisation and labour in Asia and the Pacific.

Colonialism and male domestic service is a book packed with detail and analysis, aiming to fill large gaps in historicising late nineteenth and early twentieth century encounters between colonisers and colonised by underscoring the significance of otherwise hidden or ‘background’ labourers in the facilitation, maintenance, and subsequent waning of patriarchal power in Asia and the Pacific. A good amount of effort is invested in bringing these workers’ stories into the forefront not only to demonstrate their association with colonial prestige and luxury (as they were indeed propped up to be the figures that represented access to nobility), but to emphasise the ways in which they also subverted colonial control whenever they can, thereby accounting for their agency, as opposed to what is usually thought of as their submissive participation in colonial rule. These workers’ labors are also strung together as pieces of service opportunities that arose in different parts of Asia and the Pacific so much so that ‘domestic’ work itself became patterned by a series of networks that girded colonial rule in these places. This realisation only became possible because the book identified instances of male servitude not in site-specific ways, but in the ways by which they compared or connected with similar labour practices in nearby places. In this sense, ‘cultures’ of male domestic servitude that were institutionalised, represented, and challenged come out vividly in all their depth and breadth. This comparative approach therefore makes this volume rich, nuanced, and intersectionally expansive.

Domestic work need not be confined to the home. In this book, the steamship and the hotel are two locations that made possible the extension of cultures of servitude in places where, in such cases, the caretaking of masters, now regarded as ‘guests’, reached a more pronounced and systematic professional tinge. And because workers practised their professions next to each other, oftentimes within palpable hierarchical set-ups, new and better opportunities to organise, protest, and advocate for group rights became possible. The two chapters that deal with these beyond-the-home workplaces strongly show the latent and activated forms of empowerment that a pivotal turn for workers’ rights could harness. The ubiquity of the male servant at the height of imperialism in this region of the world is, thus, appreciated and understood in very multifaceted ways.

The accompanying photographs appear to convey so much more meaning because the authors carefully selected them and were judicious enough to provide readers with brief and even-tempered analyses. A separate chapter on political activism emerges at the very end in quite unexpected ways to feature ‘transcolonial solidarities’ instead of dealing with specifically bounded sites as the preceding chapters did. But the narrative and theme of workers’ agency is equally strong here. The very last part of the book quickly gestures towards the decline of male domestic service from the 1920s onwards, and then interestingly signals its re-appearance in the context of this current generation's heightened global labour flows acutely felt in industries like cruise shipping, hotel and restaurant operations, and senior or home-based care. The domestic servants that were the subjects of this book may otherwise belong to the very same labour pools that are the sources of recruitment today for these industries. To wit, the search and need for a dispensable, desirable, and dependable labour force contained in nonwhite, low-paid, male bodies, as this book attests, is not going to end soon.